Woot! I've seen a couple of family bloggers use this term so when I saw it on one of the nonfamily blogs I read from time to time, it caught my eye. If you click on the title of the post, it will lead you to that site, if you like to read about words.
W00t is spelled with a couple of zeroes in the middle but it’s said as “woot”. It’s a small cry of joy, perhaps after completing a task, after besting an opponent, or for no reason at all. Merriam-Webster says, “It became popular in online gaming as part of what is known as l33t (‘leet’, or ‘elite’) speak, an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters.”
Its origins are disputed. Some say it’s a blend from the cry Wow! Loot!, one that might be uttered when a Dungeons & Dragons player came across treasure; Merriam-Webster notes that it has been said to be an acronym for we owned the other team (meaning that our team bested them utterly); others argue that it derives from the Scots hoot!, which really is a bit of a hoot, since the Oxford English Dictionary describes that as an “ejaculation expressing dissatisfaction with, or impatient and somewhat contemptuous dismissal of, a statement or notion”, which hardly fits the context.
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